https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30997004

Awful takes from awful people

whenever you hear the word “decolonization” you pretty much know right off the bat that you are talking to a Marxist. These people have no real knowledge of history, or any other subject for that matter and are generally best ignored or ridiculed. Colonialism has pretty much existed since ancient times and there’s nothing inherently “white” about it… it’s just part of HUMAN experience.

  • Janked [he/him]
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    edit-2
    2 years ago

    I know that I should laugh because it's so ridiculous, but the idea that Marxists "have no REAL KNOWLEDGE of history" really pisses me off. It makes me so incredibly angry that shitlibs wag their fingers with an unearned sense of superiority because they can regurgitate lessons from their high school history class and haven't picked up a non-harry potter book since, while people that do countless hours of research, reading, thinking, and (hopefully) actually taking action in their communities are dismissed as the dumb ones, the clueless ones....it's really maddening, luckily Marxism is completely correct, otherwise it'd be so easy to doubt myself.

    • emizeko [they/them]
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      edit-2
      2 years ago

      reminds me of this

      It is so frustrating to argue with libs who make arguments so old that literally Marx himself responded to them. I get the impression that Marxists already won the debate back in the 19th century and the liberal tactic has just been to pretend the debate has never happened, to continue repeating centuries-old arguments over and over again as if they've never been responded to, and to discourage anyone from looking into Marxism or reading Marx, Lenin, Mao, etc.

      by u/aimixin

  • wombat [none/use name]
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    2 years ago

    whenever you hear the word “decolonization” you pretty much know right off the bat that you are talking to a Marxist.

    :yes-comm:

  • ssjmarx [he/him]
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    2 years ago

    A few math people dared to ask the question, "why is every math major a white guy?", and a certain section of racist libs completely lost their minds.

  • RNAi [he/him]
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    2 years ago

    Sure, colonialism was not "invented" by "white" people, but euros did a lot of it world wide for the last 5 centuries

  • Parzivus [any]
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    2 years ago

    Claiming something is human nature and using it as an excuse to ignore it is one of the worst qualities of libs

    • git [he/him, comrade/them]
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      2 years ago

      It's quite literally a capitalist watering hole full of CEOs/C-suites/PMC. There are no masks there.

  • CheGueBeara [he/him]
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    2 years ago

    If you try to argue with that person, your comment will get flagged as political and therefore in violation of the ToS, then put below a fold. Continue doing so and you'll get rate-limited.

    That first comment will remain, however. Shitting on socialists (or really, anything left of Pete Buttigieg's latest persona) in top-level comments is conveniently non-political.

      • UlyssesT [he/him]
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        edit-2
        2 years ago

        Parts of the Indiana Jones movies aged very poorly. The college sections especially, and Marian's character and character arc. Oh right, and Sean Connery also being a sex pest creeping on women less than half his age and somehow we're supposed to like him.

  • LeninWalksTheWorld [any]
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    2 years ago

    existed since ancient times

    they're talking about Rome (guarantee these morons only study European history so they can jack it to statues) and probably how Caesar genocided the Gauls specifically. If they weren't idiot internet commenters they'd know that the Greco-Roman tradition is what "white" European culture is based on. European colonists a millenia later we're still using the same justifications for "civilizing" native peoples that the Romans used. So yeah there is definitely something "white" about it considering European were the most prolific and barbaric colonizers in the world.

    of course they'll just say some shit like "but the Aztecs killed a whole village and resettled it once checkmate communists" and go on being a massive racist

  • learn3code [they/them]
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    2 years ago

    Smallpox has pretty much existed since ancient times and there's nothing inherently "white" about it... it's just part of HUMAN experience.

  • OfficialBenGarrison [he/him]
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    2 years ago

    Yes, humans are evil. But the response isn't "therefore let's embrace our de-generacy and [redacted] each other for a laugh."

  • TerminalEncounter [she/her]
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    edit-2
    2 years ago

    I dunno if this will be hot take here, hope it isn't, but there definitely needs to be a de-whitening of math. All my good profs were ethnic whites from the former warsaw bloc (like Polish or Romanian) or were actual POC like Indians. But they were all sessionals. All the senior profs and people in charge of departments were white, glad they were taking some kind of initiative on sort of decolonizing a math department but it doesn't really count if you just hire ethnic whites on one year contracts instead of POC in tenure track positions... It's kind of shitty because the rest of the world has a really rich history of mathematics, like Brahmagupta inventing zero - which is underappreciated in a post invention of integers world - or Ramanujan, or Chinese Remainder Theorem (invented in China a long ass time ago), and so on. I guess they'd say it shouldn't matter but I dunno, I had to dig into the history of mathematics to find out a lot of this stuff, you always get the impression that the Greeks invented Geometry and then Euler invented everything else and Europe was the centre of math for hundreds of years, so now everyone else is coming to learn from European mathematics as good students instead of being active participants with their own legitimate history and brilliance. It's especially important for math because so much depends on seeing a unusual connection from one area to another to prove or disprove longstanding conjectures.

    • becauseoftheblood [she/her]
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      2 years ago

      It does kind of get into the idea that people from more white cultures were much more obsessed with putting their name on things and attaching their identity to ideas that weren't actually diving real world problems at the time. Like the Chinese remainder theorem solved a real world problem whereas the stuff European mathematicians were doing was more akin to philosophy. It wasn't until recent history that we've made use of some really old mathematical ideas. And like not to say other cultures weren't focused on more theoretical stuff, but the white hegemony would definitely discard whatever they did